Popular Tales

by Charles Perrault

La Barbe Bleue.

Blue Beard.

The story of Blue Beard, as told by Perrault, is, of all his collection, the most apt to move pity and terror. It has also least of the supernatural. Here are no talking beasts, no fairies, nor ogres. Only the enchanted key is fée, or wakan as the Algonkins say, that is, possesses magical properties. In all else the story is a drama of daily and even of contemporary life, for Blue Beard has the gilded coaches and embroidered furniture of the seventeenth century, and his wife's brothers hold commissions in the dragoons and musketeers. The story relies for its interest on the curiosity of the wife (the moral motive), on the vision of the slain women, and on the suspense of waiting while Sister Anne watches from the tower. These simple materials, admirably handled, make up the terrible story of Blue Beard.

Attempts have been made to find for Blue Beard an historical foundation. M. Collin de Plancy mentions a theory that the hero was a seigneur of the house of Beaumanoir (Œuvres Choisies de Ch. Perrault, p. 40, Paris, 1826). Others have fancied that Blue Beard was a popular version of the deeds of Gilles de Retz, the too celebrated monster of mediæval history, or of a more or less mythical Breton prince of the sixth century, Cormorus or Comorre, who married Sainte Trophime or Triphime, and killed her, as he had killed his other wives, when she was about to become a mother. She was restored to life by St. Gildas[48]. If there is a trace of the Blue Beard story in the legend of the Saint, it does not follow that the legend is the source of the story. The Märchen of Peau d'Ane has been absorbed into the legend of Sainte Dipne or Dympne, and the names of saints, like the names of gods and heroes in older faiths, had the power of attracting Märchen into their cycle.

Blue Beard is essentially popular and traditional. The elements are found in countries where Gilles de Retz and Comorre and Sainte Triphime were never known. The leading idea, of curiosity punished, of the box or door which may not be opened, and of the prohibition infringed with evil results, is of world-wide distribution. In many countries this notion inspires the myths of the origin of Death[49]. In German Märchen there are several parallels, more or less close, to Blue Beard (Grimm 3, 40, 46). In Our Lady's Child (3) the Virgin entrusts a little girl with keys of thirteen doors, of which she may only open twelve. Behind each door she found an apostle, behind the thirteenth the Trinity, in a glory of flame, like Zeus when he consumed Semele. The girl's finger became golden with the light, as Blue Beard's key was dyed with the blood. The child was banished from heaven, and her later adventures are on the lines of the falsely accused wife, like those of the Belle au Bois Dormant, with the Virgin for mother-in-law and with a repentance for a moral conclusion. In the Robber Bridegroom there is a girl betrothed to a woman-slayer; she detects and denounces him, pretending, as in the old English tale, she is describing a dream. 'Like the old tale, my Lord, it is not so, nor 'twas not so; but indeed God forbid that it should be so[50].' Except for the 'larder' of the Robber, and of Mr. Fox in the English variant, these stories do not closely resemble Blue Beard. In Grimm's Fitcher's Bird (46) the resemblance is closer. A man, apparently a beggar, carries off the eldest of three sisters to a magnificent house, and leaves her with the keys, an egg, and the prohibition to open a certain door. She opens it, finds a block, an axe, a basin of blood, and the egg falling into the blood refuses to be cleansed. The man slays her, her second sister shares her fate, the third leaves the egg behind when she visits the secret room, and miraculously restores her sisters to life by reuniting their limbs. The same idea occurs in the Kaffir tale of the Ox (Callaway, Nursery Tales of the Zulus, p. 230). The rest of the story, with the escape from the monster, has no connection with Blue Beard, except that the wretch is put to death. Indeed, it would have been highly inconvenient for Blue Beard's surviving bride if the dead ladies had been resuscitated. Her legal position would have been ambiguous, and she could not have inherited the gold coaches and embroidered furniture. Grimm originally published another German form of Blue Beard (62 in first edition), but withdrew it, being of opinion that it might have been derived from Perrault. The story of the Third Calender in the Arabian Nights (Night 66) has nothing in common with Blue Beard but the prohibition to open a door.

In Italy[51] the Devil is the wooer, the closed door opens on hell: the rest, the adventures of three sisters, resembles Grimm's Fitcher's Bird, with a touch of humour. The Devil, seeing the resuscitated girls, is daunted by the idea of facing three wives, and decamps. He had no scruple, it will be seen, about marrying his deceased wife's sister. The Russian like the Oriental stories generally make a man indulge the fatal curiosity, and open the forbidden door. Mr. Ralston quotes from Löwe's Esthnische Märchen (No. 20) a tale almost too closely like Perrault's. There is a sister, and the goose boy takes the rôle of rescuer. M. de Gubernatis thinks that the key 'is perhaps the Moon!' (Zoological Mythology, 1. 168). In the Gaelic version the heroine is cleansed of blood by a grateful Cat, whose services her sisters had neglected (Campbell, Tales of West Highlands, No. 41). In the Katha Sarit Sagara (iii. p. 223) a hero, Saktideva, is forbidden to approach a certain palace terrace. He breaks the taboo, and finds three dead maidens in three pavilions. A horse then kicks him into a lake, and, whereas he had been in the Golden City, hard to win, he finds himself at home in Vardhamana. The affair is but an incident in the medley of incidents, some resembling passages in the Odyssey, which make up the story (compare Ralston's note, Russian Fairy Tales, p. 99).

From these brief analyses it will be plain that, in point of art, Perrault's tale has a great advantage over its popular rivals. It is at once more sober and more terrible, and (especially when compared with the confusion of incidents in the Katha Sarit Sagara) possesses an epical unity of idea and action.

In spite of this artistic character, Perrault's tale is clearly of popular origin, as the existence of variants in the folklore of other countries demonstrates. But the details are so fluctuating, that we need not hope to find in them memories of ancient myth, nor is it safe to follow M. André Lefèvre, when he thinks that, in the two avenging brothers, he recognises the Vedic Asvins.

[48] The passages in the legend of Sainte Triphime are quoted by M. Deulin, Contes de Ma Mère l'Oye, p. 178. See also Annuaire Hist. et Arch. de Bretagne, Année 1862. The Saint has a warning vision of the dead wives, but not in consequence of opening a forbidden door.

[49] A partial collection of these will be found in La Mythologie, Lang. Paris 1886. Australians, Ningphos, Greeks (Pandora's box), the Montaguais of Labrador (Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1634), the Odahwah Indians (Hind's Explorations in Labrador, i. 61, note 2), are examples of races which believe death to have come into the world as the punishment of an infringed prohibition of this sort. The deathly swoon of Psyche, in The Golden Ass of Apuleius, when she has opened the pyx of Proserpine, is another instance.